


Anneke Johansen's Portrait

by meganphntmgrl



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 13:08:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meganphntmgrl/pseuds/meganphntmgrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Survival is not escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anneke Johansen's Portrait

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sweetcarolanne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetcarolanne/gifts).



     Sundered as my belief in the guiding hand of a benevolent Providence has been over the course of the most recent months of my life, I do not hesitate to term it a mercy that the mortal remains of Anneke Johansen now rest cold in the ground beside those of the husband she scarcely outlived. I am no longer convinced that either Anneke nor Gustaf’s unlucky souls were received into the arms of a loving God, as I once might have piously asserted, yet the events through which they lived were of such otherworldly terror that it is impossible to view their passings as untimely or unwelcome. The dead cannot suffer.

     I, however, am not yet dead, and the knowledge I carry with me would be suffering enough without the seizures that have begun to overtake my body perhaps twice a week. I cannot determine if these have their origin in the mental exhaustion which I have endured since Anneke Johansen died before my eyes, or if they have their basis in more directly sinister machinations, but to attempt to distinguish between the two is an exercise in futility. The root of either explanation is the same, and if I do not live to see my thirty-fifth year- which I very greatly doubt I shall- this account seeks to give future generations some understanding of why.

     When I first became acquainted with Anneke Johansen, she was still Miss Anneke Kragness, three years my junior. We were together enrolled in a girls’ school in Oslo and found common ground for friendship in that each of us was the daughter of merely prosperous farmers rather than the elite. The casual snobbery of our classmates drove us together, for money alone did not create status enough to allow us into their little _ton_ , a fact which we were never allowed to forget.

     Anneke was a supple and somewhat somber-looking creature despite her warm and happy nature, with large, liquid dark eyes set in a face of almost childlike purity even as she neared her fifteenth year. The only characteristic which lead to her being slighted among the school’s accounting of beauties was her hair, which, while as fair as was prized among the student body, curled so tightly as to frizz into a kind of mass which extended back from her head and over her shoulders like some kind of descended cumulus. 

     With no prospects of greatness ahead of us, Anneke and I each decided upon a form of employment we intended to enter into after our schooling concluded. I, the first to graduate, became a midwife, and Anneke became a successful dressmaker’s assistant a few years later. We had each found a means of utilizing our unpromising girlhoods to our best advantage.

     Anneke had been working at the dressmaker’s for some eighteen months when she attracted the wandering eye of one Gustaf Johansen, a sailor of good physique and well-regarded character. Their courtship was brief, secretive, passionate, and they quite happily made their way to the altar a mere four months later. Wagging tongues which ascribed a particular and salacious meaning to their haste were silenced when Anneke failed to expand and deliver a child. 

     Indeed, Anneke and Gustaf’s childlessness was, for a long and now sadly blessed time, the only cause of their unhappiness. Anneke gained a reputation of great integrity and faith even while her husband was away at sea, despite the almost natural assumption that she would give in to baser temptations and stray from her vows. She had by now, in the full bloom of womanhood, acquired a quality of ethereality that I believe only enhanced the impression she left upon others. 

     In late 1924, Gustaf and Anneke were forced to part yet again, as Gustaf was due to sail to New Zealand, where he was to join the crew of the good ship _Emma_ as second mate, bound for Peru. The tenderness with which they exchanged their farewell was enough to bring a tear to the eye of all but the most hardened misanthrope. 

     As we left the harbor, Anneke seemed possessed of a kind of queer, nervous energy that was quite unlike her usual sweet and sober demeanor. She  wrung her small white hands fitfully, and caught her lower lip between her bright teeth until it had become red and swollen as a strawberry. When I asked her what was giving her such concern, she laughed and pressed a hand to her temple.

     “Oh! it’s nothing, Karin, just a nervous fancy,” she said in bright and brittle tones. “You mustn’t mind it. I feel very foolish even thinking it.”  
    “Thinking of what?” I enquired.

     Anneke’s red mouth opened and shut, and then opened again as her gaze cast downward. She looked up again, and in that moment I believe that she fully meant to confess the cause of her sudden fervour, but she laughed again, and I did not press the matter further.

     By the following day, Anneke had recovered her usual gentle gaiety. She went to work at the dress shop in high spirits, we retired to her house for dinner together when she was done, arm in arm and quite pleased. I had successfully delivered a pair of twins to Mrs. Allum that morning, and both of us were quite incapable of being brought low for a fair amount of time. In retrospect I believe that to Anneke, I was merely a welcome respite from Gustaf’s absence, but I scarcely grudged the time spent with my dearest friend.

     A month into Gustaf’s voyage- at about the time, I figure, he must have arrived in Auckland to meet the ship he was bound to- I arrived to meet Anneke at her dress shop when her workday was concluded, and was surprised to see that her hair had been cut off- not cropped, as some women nowadays wear it, but sufficiently shortened as to form a delicate waving halo about her face and head. She was quite proud of this achievement, very confident that Gustaf would like it, and she gave my lopsided chignon a small and sardonic pat.

     “Perhaps you ought to be next,” she teased, though when I made it clear that I had no intention of parting with my hair- my best feature, I believed, even if my choice of employment required me to gather it back- she gracefully conceded. Such was Anneke’s way. 

     She sat for a portrait and had it sent to Callao, so that Gustaf might retrieve it when his ship reached port. This, however, was never to be.

     Some seven weeks after the _Emma_ ’s departure from Auckland, Anneke rushed toward me in the street with distressed hair and an expression of abject devastation marring her sweet features. I caught her up in my arms to soothe her.

     “Anneke, what has happened?” I asked, smoothing her hair with great tenderness.  
     “It’s Gustaf,” she said, tears springing from her eyes. “He’s fallen ill- they say he’s raving-“  
     “What?”   
     “His ship has come into port in Australia, Karin- _and he is the only one left alive_.”

     I took the poor creature home to offer her dinner and whatever consolations I could give her, but there was no assuaging Anneke.

     “Do you recall my fit of nerves upon Gustaf’s departure?” she asked in morose tones, ignoring her food. “I suppose I somehow knew he would come to harm.”  
     “Is he in traveling condition?” I enquired.  
     “I don’t know,” said Anneke. “I am not waiting to find out, though. I shall have to go to him myself.”

     Within two days’ time, Anneke was bound for Australia and I was alone. 

     It was a long time before she and Gustaf returned to Oslo. I scarcely recognized Gustaf when they did. He had once been handsome, hearty, and golden-haired, but the spectre beside Anneke’s side who disembarked the train before my eyes was a thin, feverish man with wholly whitened hair and a trembling demeanor. Anneke was as tender as a nurse, supporting his weak frame with her own little body.

     There was no time for conversation on the way home. Gustaf did not have the constitution for it, and neither Anneke nor myself had the heart to push him into it. The surprise of Anneke’s new coiffeur had come to a piteous conclusion; Gustaf fingered at her shortened locks and murmured that she had come to him in a dream some three days before she joined him in Australia, and that her hair was still long then, as in the picture of her he had brought to sea. Anneke wept and called him her poor darling, and swore her love to him was still true and had never faltered.

     When I visited the Johansens over the subsequent weeks, Anneke’s distress only grew. Gustaf devoted long hours to an incomprehensible manuscript he did not permit her to read regarding his aborted mission; when Anneke did achieve a glimpse of it, she realized it was in a language she did not understand but believed to be English. Her eyes became permanently tear-reddened by her love for her unfortunate husband, and I feared greatly for both of them.

     Gustaf was no longer in any condition to go to sea, which meant the task of supporting the both of them fell to Anneke. She took longer hours at the dressmaker’s, returning home drowsing and sore but smiling, for Gustaf still lived. 

     Had she not, the horror that pursued Gustaf- and ultimately, all of us- might have been thwarted, at least for a short time.

     I took pity on my unfortunate friends by preparing numerous breads for them in my spare time. When a day arrived that my services were not required by some mother’s bedside, I stopped by the Johansens’ home, letting myself in with the key Anneke had given me long ago. 

     The house, at first, seemed silent. I assumed Gustaf to be sleeping, and went to deposit the loaves of bread with a kind note on their modest kitchen table, when I heard a voice that fills me with a thrill of dread to recall even now.

    It sounded female, or very nearly, and the words it said were of exquisite sweetness and love that were made terribly perverse by the way it said them. I struggle to describe the accent lurking at the very edges of those words- nearly imperceptible, yet somehow lending them a tinge of unfathomable horror, like a poorly wrought facsimile of human speech rendered infinitely more appalling by what it said:

    “My sweet, my brave one- to look on me as you did, _to do as none have done-_ “

     My heartbeat pounding in my ears, I was propelled by morbid fascination to press my ear to the door through which these words could be heard, and I realized the terrible endearments had answers- _Gustaf’s own labored, whimpering breathing_!

    Concerns of propriety vanishing in an instant, I flung open the door. I shudder to describe what I saw therein.

    Gustaf Johansen, quite nude, lay sweat-dampened and weak on the bed, straddled by none other than Anneke- except it was not Anneke. It could not be Anneke, for Anneke’s eyes never shewed such terrible fury as the thing did when it rounded upon me with amoebic fluidity. It had Anneke’s form, Anneke’s face, but it had the quality of a projection in three dimensions. Not even a solid doppelgänger would have moved as it did, no vampire of legend could have nearly rippled around the edges, no ghost could look as poorly copied from a human form. I was at once convinced that it was merely an aspect of something far larger, far less comprehensible, and when it dismounted Gustaf’s body, I fell into a swoon.

    When I awakened, I was in my own bed. My landlady brought me a cup of hot water and a basin of cooler water with which to wash my face. I enquired what had become of me, and she said that Gustaf Johansen had, despite his own state, carried me home and deposited me on my doorstep the way one might a drunk. My landlady and her husband had carried me upstairs.

     “Did he say what had become of me?” I asked her.  
     “He found you had collapsed in his kitchen while delivering your bread,” she said. “He has gone off to see his wife.”

      I was again filled with a great hollowing dread. Gustaf Johansen was in no state to carry me as far as my own home without some external aid, and I did not believe my so-called rescuer to be the sailor at all. Flinging back my bedsheets, to my landlady’s alarm, I rushed out of the house to find Anneke.

    I was too late. When I found Anneke at the dressmaker’s, there were two constables speaking to her. Gustaf had died suddenly while walking through the harbor that very afternoon. Anneke protested plaintively that he had come to see her scarcely two hours before, but this did not dissuade them at all. He had been dead only one, and had seen Anneke for only forty minutes.

     Anneke was devastated. She mourned her husband to the fullest and most traditionally regulated extent. Shortly after his passing, an American professor arrived on Anneke’s doorstep to enquire after him, to her confusion. Her English was poor, and she could not determine much beyond that he was looking for Gustaf. She gave him Gustaf’s English manuscript and sent him off, and puzzled as she was, she did not pursue the matter further.

    In two weeks’ time, Anneke discovered she was well into carrying Gustaf’s posthumous child, conceived despite its father’s illness in some night of happy reunion in the weeks after they had returned to Oslo. This news restored a great deal of her erstwhile manner, and from my present perspective I cannot regard the joy with which she prepared for the motherhood she had been denied for so long with anything but a kind of wistfulness. None of us, particularly not poor gentle Anneke, understood what was in store until it was far too late.

     The pregnancy progressed normally, with Anneke growing all but luminescent with beauty and health while her body expanded to house the child. She stroked the roundness of her belly and said loving things to her growing baby, and once again seemed to be the sweet and happy creature I had known for so long. The child was to be named Gustaf if it was a boy, and Karin after myself if it was a girl.

     Anneke asked that I performed the honors when her labor arrived, and when I at last received a telegram urging me to her household, I found Father Kjellberg, the local priest, already in attendance. Anneke was propped up in bed, glistening with sweat and already tired from exertion, but smiling broadly when I entered her bedroom. A lace-trimmed basinet stood in waiting for its soon-to-be occupant a safe distance from the cheerfully glowing fireplace.

     So great was Anneke’s joy that her cries of pain were tempered by comments of love she spoke aloud to her child to welcome it into the world, beseeching it breathlessly that she wanted to hold it, to see his face. I could see something dim and reddish at last, and called for her to push harder than ever. Anneke Johansen’s child had nearly arrived.

     The top of the baby’s head came into view, pink and hairless- but not all children are born with hair, after all, and certainly not enough to be discerned through the fluids of birth. I told Anneke to push once more-

     The air was suddenly pierced by a wild, inhuman screaming of a kind none of us had ever heard before, the roar of some direly injured monster. Father Kjellberg covered his ears in an instinctive gesture of horror, and I would have done the same had my hands not been coated in the grotesque byproducts of the birthing process. Anneke tried to sit up and see what was wrong, but was effectively paralyzed by the horrid thing half-protruded from her body. 

     I reached to seize it in the vain hope that the pulpy, elongated head was merely that of a deformed but human infant, a shock to be sure but deserving of care and love all the same, but the rest of its body as it slid out of Anneke’s was a scaly, bulbous horror, its shriveled limbs terminating in claws below and fleshy tentacle-like things above. Its eyes were huge, reptilian, and glassy, and it flailed about hideously as it screamed. 

     The thing jerked its head about wildly, taking us in with a terrible alien intelligence. It seemed almost to redouble its efforts after looking at the three of us, as though it were itself terrified, and in an act of unthinking repulsion I threw the thing into the fireplace. 

    Its skin hissed and crackled, while its abominable screaming rose to a crescendo and then suddenly, mercifully faded away. Black, foul-smelling smoke began to pour from the fireplace, but Father Kjellberg and I stood panting with relief.

     When I looked back at Anneke in the bed, she was motionless and glassy-eyed, with her face contorted into a grotesque silent scream. The sight of her abominable child had struck her dead.

     The smoke grew too heavy for the priest and I to stand, and we rushed out before we too fell dead. Father Kjellberg ran and did not stop; a mere three nights later, he and his Wednesday evening congregation perished in a terrible fire which destroyed the church altogether. Subsequent investigation indicated that he had bolted the doors and set the blaze himself, using the altar as the center of it and using one of the processional candles as the torch with which to light it.

     As for myself, I have maintained my wits, though not my health. I fled Oslo after the birth of Anneke’s child for fear of being condemned as a murderess, though the hindering seizures that began shortly after I inhaled the foul smoke of that thing’s burning body have worsened and, I suspect, will soon make short work of me. The life I lead now, of constant scurrying from village to village before I can be found out, is hardly suited to one in my condition.

     I do not know what strange power Gustaf Johansen encountered during his voyage, but I believe- perhaps my wits are not as intact as they feel, for I believe all the same!- that it was that which took Anneke’s form, first as the long-haired spectre he encountered ‘in a dream’ before she came to him in Australia, and then as the projection I witnessed ravishing him while the true Anneke was at her shop. I further believe that it was this same unfathomably alien thing that fathered Anneke’s child- the timeline of her ill-fated pregnancy, along with Gustaf’s sudden death, convinces me that it seized Gustaf’s body, somehow- for how else might it have carried me home?- and that the way in which Anneke spent what she believed to be the last forty minutes of her time with Gustaf may be guessed by the reader. 

      As I write this, I am bound for New York City under an assumed name. It is my intention to deliver this account to the American who received Gustaf’s manuscript- I understand him to be called Thurston- and I can only pray that there will be someone there to translate this for him. Perhaps the horrors I have witnessed will illuminate a greater truth for him, if there is indeed any truth to be found in a world I have now seen without the comforting veil we superimpose over its features to protect ourselves.

**Author's Note:**

> This assignment sort of went off in a different direction than I think was asked for, but I hope it's not too far off from what was wanted. The nature of the request- Cthulhu falls in love with Gustaf Johansen, the sole survivor of a firsthand encounter with the grumpy reawakened Old One- is so counter to the nature of the Mythos that I ended up accepting it as a kind of dare to see how much else I could twist around from Lovecraft's usual patterns while keeping it in that milieu- a Scandinavian setting instead of New England, a female narrator (though she acquired the same level of passionate devotion to her victimized friend of the same gender that so many of Lovecraft's male protagonists have), the sexual elements in the forefront, etc.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this, sweetcarolanne. I sort of have a Lovecraftian pastiching hobby in other fandoms as it is, so getting to write something in the actual Mythos was a fun change of pace.


End file.
